Tuesday January 22, 2013, 6:27 pm
I have no doubt that climate change is against flowers and happiness. I know that the primary agent in killing honey bees is a nicotine based pesticide family manufactured by the Bayer Drug and Chemical Company in Germany. Still, I suspect that climate change is also a contributing factor.

Tuesday January 22, 2013, 10:38 pm
This is so true and as a gardener, I have been witnessing it for 6 years now and was talking about it then..........It is REALLY EVIDENT these last 2 years.......not only flowers, EVERYONE'S FOOD SUPPLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wednesday January 23, 2013, 8:35 am
I have iris and azaela trying to bloom now - in January??? There are worries about the peaches this year and what happens with one plant group manages to happen to the others. We need to stop talking and start doing when it comes to climate change...

Thursday January 24, 2013, 5:33 pm
For now, many plants appear to be adapting to the rise in temperature. But botanists are questioning how long it will be before plants can no longer adjust to increasingly early spring temperatures. “Even things that are benefitting are shifting so much out of their normal schedule that they are missing common associations that they would have in nature, like primary insect pollinations, or primary dispersers that move their fruits and seeds around,” Davis says.

To conduct the study, Davis and his colleagues used—how cool is this?—data sets from Henry David Thoreau, poet and philosopher of Walden Pond, who recorded flowering times across Concord, Mass., in the mid 1800s, as well as information collected by environmentalist Aldo Leopold on flowers in central Wisconsin in the mid 1930s.

They compared these records to flowering times in 2010 and 2012, two recent years with unusually warm springs, and found a dramatic shift. Thoreau saw highbush blueberry flower in the middle of May, while Davis observed the same plant flower on April 1st 150 years later.

Other researchers are seeing similar patterns in other areas of the country.

“Two thousands twelve was a record early flowering event in the Rocky Mountains,” says David Inouye, a biology professor at the University of Maryland who studies how climate change affects plants living at high altitudes. “We are seeing warm spells in early to mid spring that trigger plants to develop buds or flower, but then a hard freeze comes along and plants are lost.”

Some intrepid farmers and gardeners have begun mitigating frost damage with smudge pots, windmills, and even electric heaters to keep their crops from freezing during “false springs.” In the future, Inouye said, there may be a kind of assisted migration, in which people move seeds and plants northward as the temperature warms so that plants can continue to grow in the climate zone to which they are adapted. But for wildflowers in a place like Colorado, he said, there is not much we can do in the short term.

Charles Davis hopes that early flowers will help people realize how climate change is affecting our planet in ways that hit a little closer to home.

"botanists are questioning how long it will be before plants can no longer adjust to increasingly early spring temperatures. “Even things that are benefitting are shifting so much out of their normal schedule that they are missing common associations that they would have in nature, like primary insect pollinations, or primary dispersers that move their fruits and seeds around,” Davis says."

Indeed. We need to do all we can to slow down climate change and drought.